From his crash seat, all he could see was people and bulkhead.
Rows and rows of marines in fresh Fleet blacks, strapped into webbing that still creaked like new polymer. Sailors in different-cut uniforms. Techs with tool cases clipped to their boots. Thousands of bodies packed into a metal cylinder that hummed and shuddered around them.
Somewhere beyond all that mass, drives burned and space moved.
Overhead, a line on Kaden’s HUD crept toward zero.
TRANSIT: ERIDANI STAGING YARDS
ETA: 00:06:12
“Six minutes,” Song muttered from the seat to Kaden’s left. “I swear this barge has been decelerating for the last six hours just to spite me.”
“Hard to spite someone who slept through most of it,” Navarro said from his right. She had her head tipped back against the padded rest, eyes closed, hands folded loose over her harness.
“I slept because there’s nothing to do,” Song said. “We’re in a tube full of people in other tubes on the way to a bigger tube full of ships. The romance is staggering.”
“You’ll get your romance when someone starts shooting at you,” Navarro murmured. “Be patient.”
Kaden let them bicker and watched the ETA tick down. Behind that simple countdown, the System layered quieter tags.
TRANSIT MODE: LOCAL BURN / AURORA CORRIDOR EGRESS
CURRENT POSITION: EPSILON ERIDANI – INNER ORBIT
Three days ago, they’d boarded a smaller shuttle in Earth low orbit. The ship had boosted out to the Aurora “throat” at the edge of the system, coupled them to something bigger and hungrier, and then the universe had—shifted.
Not blinked. Not jumped. Just… slid sideways.
He still remembered Rhein’s holo, a spiderweb of light between galaxies.
“Aurora didn’t give us faster ships,” the instructor had said. “It gave us a map. Corridors. Threads where space is thinner and distance lies. You drop into one, you fall along it. To Sol’s throat from Earth orbit? Hours. From Sol to Eridani along the main band? A day. From here to the forward musters in Andromeda?” He’d tapped the line that vanished off the map, across the impossible gulf. “Three weeks ship-time. If the corridors hold. If the nodes behave. If you don’t fall off the rails and end up crawling Newton-style between the stars like your great-grandparents dreamed about.”
They weren’t on that leg yet. Eridani Staging Yards was the last civilized stop on the human side of the abyss. Beyond that, it was all corridors, Opp positions, and whatever Aurora thought was “interesting.”
“Mercer,” Song said. “You doing math in your head again? You get this squinty thing.”
“Just thinking,” Kaden said.
“About space,” Navarro said.
“About corridors,” he admitted.
Song groaned.
“Worst kind of marine,” he said. “The kind who knows how far the fall is.”
Before Kaden could answer, the barge’s intercom clicked.
“Attention all personnel,” a bored voice said. “This is the deck AI. We are on final approach to Eridani Staging Yards. ETA four minutes. Prepare for visual.”
A buzz ran through the compartment like someone had fed current into the metal.
Straps creaked. People leaned as far as their harnesses would allow, trying to angle for a glimpse of the bulkhead screens. The ones closest shifted to an external feed, replacing the plain gray with a slowly growing vista.
At first, it was just stars and a smear of light that could have been anything.
Then the smear separated into structure.
The Eridani Staging Yards were not graceful. They didn’t need to be. They were utility made manifest: a sprawling tangle of ring segments, tethered platforms, drydock spines, and hab modules all welded into a rough wheel around a faint, shimmering throat in space.
The corridor mouth looked wrong even at this distance. A bruise in the dark, outlined in a slow, shifting glow that made Kaden’s eyes want to slide off it.
“Corridor,” Navarro murmured, mostly to herself.
Around the throat, ships hung.
Some were fat-bellied haulers, waiting to be loaded with cargo and people. Some were sleek escorts, hulls smooth and paint still bright. A few were little more than skeletons wrapped around reactors, new constructions not yet wearing names.
And some were scarred.
Kaden’s HUD pinged as the barge synced with the yards.
WELCOME: ERIDANI STAGING YARDS – NODE 3
DOCKING: BERTH C-RING, SPINE 7
ASSIGNMENT CHECK:
– ALL PERSONNEL: VIEW DOCKING ORDERS FOR SHIP / BAY
A small window unfolded in the corner of his vision.
ASSIGNMENT: HIS VALIANT (VAL-329)
DOCK: YARD SPINE 2 – BERTH 4
“Spine two, berth four,” Kaden said aloud.
“Same,” Navarro said.
Song snorted.
“Spine six, berth one,” he said. “Theta-5 gets the scenic walk, I guess.”
“You need the exercise,” Navarro said.
The barge shuddered as thrusters fired. The external feed on the bulkhead swung, bringing a new section of the yards into view.
Docks marched past, each with its own resident.
Hull numbers. Names. Some Kaden recognized from briefings and history lectures. Most he didn’t.
Then the feed rotated, and he forgot how to breathe for a second.
VAL-329 hung against the dock like something that refused to fall.
HIS Valiant was ugly.
Not in the way training hulks were ugly. It wasn't purposefully misaligned and deliberately chaotic. Valiant’s lines had clearly started as sleek once. A spearhead-class assault cruiser, maybe even graceful on the holo when she rolled off the New Toronto yards.
Fifty-six years under fire had sandblasted the grace off her.
She was a dark, armored spine about four hundred and fifty meters long, tapering toward a prow that had once been sharp and now looked more like a broken battering ram. Heavy plating ran the length of that spine, some of it original, some clearly patched in from different production runs. Scorched weld seams zigzagged across her flanks like old surgery scars.
The paint was a suggestion more than a reality. The Hegemony stripe along her side, white over dark blue, had been worn down to a ghost in places. In others, it had been burned entirely away, replaced by blackened metal and the faint iridescent sheen of slag that had cooled in vacuum.
Turrets studded her hull. Not the clean, evenly spaced guns of a fresh yard queen, but a mix of original mounts and retrofits. Some were flush with the armor, squat and mean. Others jutted from fresh-carved recesses, their housings a slightly different finish. Point-defense clusters curled along her sides like rows of teeth.
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Midships, a double ring of cylinders broke the line of the hull: launchers, recessed into armored sockets. Dark circles, each with a faint, spiral scoring around the edge.
“Pods,” Navarro said, quietly awed. “Those are pods.”
“You sound way too excited about that,” Song said.
“The pods are the only fun part,” she said.
Kaden had seen diagrams. Graphics in lectures. Simulations.
Seeing the real thing was different.
Breach pods looked nothing like shuttles. No wings, no broad hulls with room to maneuver. Each pod was a brutal cylinder meant for one thing: get from Valiant’s skin to someone else’s in the messiest possible way.
They fired like shells from those launch cylinders, burned hard, and hit an Opposition hull with enough force to seat the shaped drill cone. Then the cone spun, bored through armor and internal plating, and left a hot, ragged tunnel with a pod full of marines at the end of it.
No wings. No fuel to hover, turn, or sprint away. No clean vector back to the ship if something went wrong.
You rode a pod in and, if Aurora liked you, you walked back out through somebody else’s air.
The cameras tracked along Valiant’s flank. As they did, a splash of color resolved out of the scorched metal.
The insignia was huge.
A stylized eagle, wings spread mid-swoop, was painted along the bow section. Not some clean, minimalist linework—this was old-school angry, feathers and beak and eyes all sharp angles. In its talons, the eagle clutched a sword, point angled down toward nothing, blade cutting across imaginary vacuum.
The paint was faded and charred around the edges. One wingtip had a black scorch mark across it where something had kissed the hull hard enough to slag armor and cook the pigment to ash. The sword’s edge had been repainted at some point; it gleamed brighter than the rest, a fresh line over an old story.
Under the eagle, the name was stenciled in block letters half-eaten by time.
VALIANT
“Subtle,” Song said.
“I like her,” Navarro said.
“Her?” Song echoed.
Navarro shrugged against her harness.
“Look at her,” she said. “That’s not an ‘it.’ That’s a ‘she’ that’s survived more stupid decisions than we’ve had hot meals.”
Kaden found he agreed.
The feed view zoomed out as the barge adjusted its course, Valiant sliding toward the edge of the image as other hulls came into view. Some were smaller, sharp-edged escorts with fresh paint. One was a carrier, broad and slab-sided, surrounded by a cloud of tiny service tugs.
Valiant remained the one his eyes kept snapping back to. The old spear with new scars. The battered eagle with a too-bright sword.
DOCKING: C-RING, SPINE 7 – COMPLETE
Harness buckles began popping open in waves.
“All personnel assigned to HIS Valiant, VAL-329,” the barge AI said. “Proceed to Airlock 12-C. Follow AR pathing for YARD SPINE 2, BERTH 4. Do not loiter in transit corridors. Welcome to Eridani Staging Yards.”
A faint, translucent line appeared in Kaden’s HUD, leading away from their section toward one of the exit hatches.
“Showtime,” Navarro said, unbuckling.
Song groaned and did the same.
They moved with the flow. It was less a walk and more a controlled surge, hundreds of bodies funneling through openings that had only barely been sized for this many marines at once.
The airlock spillway opened into a corridor big enough to drive vehicles down. Wide strips of AR lighting guided streams of people in different colors, each tagged with ship names and berth numbers.
“Valiant is blue,” Song said. “Makes sense. She looks like she’s been choked on smoke for fifty years.”
“She’s still here,” Navarro pointed out.
“Yeah,” Song said. “Gotta respect that.”
They followed the blue line.
The Eridani yards unfolded around them in glimpses through pressure windows and gaps between bulkheads. Open spans showed the corridor mouth hanging in the distance, achingly bright. Other views framed docked ships.
Kaden recognized a destroyer he’d seen in a recruitment vid. Its hull looked almost shy next to the bulk of a cruiser that had half its flank ripped open and repaired with raw, unpainted plates.
Navarro slowed at one viewport, hand bumping Kaden’s arm.
“There,” she said.
Valiant filled the view.
Up close, the scars were worse.
Plating along her starboard flank had bubbled and re-solidified in strange, flowing shapes where something had dumped raw energy into it. You could almost trace the path of an Opp beam along her hull by following the melted streaks.
Some of the holes that had been punched in her had been patched with square plates, some with odd-shaped fragments that looked like someone had raided a scrapyard and said “this will do.” The weld marks around those patches were rough and wide.
Near the midships, a section of armor was a completely different shade. Freshly fabricated plates, darker and too-smooth, fitted over whatever had been there before.
“Erebus?” Kaden asked quietly.
“Probably,” Navarro said.
Along the dorsal spine, between weapon mounts, the pod launch rings sat in two rows. Up close, Kaden could see the faint spiraled gouges around the edges of each tube, marks from repeated launches and retrievals. A halo of soot radiated out from every one, like powder burns around a barrel.
“They look like teeth,” Song said.
“Pods or turrets?” Navarro asked.
“Both,” he said.
Kaden’s gaze tracked to the eagle again.
The scorch across one wing was worse from this angle. Someone had tried to repaint the feathers there and given up halfway, leaving a ghost of black and gray over the remnant of white.
The sword, though—that had been redone carefully. The edge was crisp. Someone had gone back out there after whatever hit burned through and said, No. This still stands.
He didn’t know why that made his throat tight.
“Mercer,” Navarro said. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Just… meeting the ship.”
Song snorted.
“Try not to stare too hard,” he said. “You’ll make her self-conscious.”
“If she was self-conscious, she’d have gotten a paint job,” Navarro said.
They peeled away from the viewport when the flow of bodies jostled them forward again.
The closer they got to Valiant’s berth, the more the crowds thinned. People peeled off toward other ships: a sleek frigate here, a repair barge there, a fat logistics carrier further down.
At the junction before the berth, a small cluster of marines stood under a holo sign rotating ship names and arrow markers. An older sergeant with a face like a carved bulkhead watched the flow with practiced boredom.
“Valiant?” he barked.
“Valiant,” Navarro said.
He pointed down the corridor without looking at them twice.
“End of the hall, turn left,” he said. “Don’t get lost. She bites.”
Song mouthed she bites at Kaden and made toothy motions. Kaden ignored him. Mostly.
The corridor opened into an observation gantry that ran along the inside of the berth.
Valiant’s hull loomed just beyond the transparent wall, so close it felt like you could reach out and touch the scarred metal. Massive docking clamps held her in place, thick arms anchored to the ship’s structural hardpoints.
Service umbilicals snaked from berth infrastructure to the cruiser’s flanks. Some pumped fuel. Others carried power, data, atmosphere.
A gangway extended from the gantry to an open hatchcut in Valiant’s side. It wasn’t pretty. The hatch was clearly a retrofit: a square door in between two older maintenance ports, the edges still bearing the faint discoloration of recent work.
A sign hovered over the entrance in Kaden’s HUD.
HIS VALIANT (VAL-329)
MARINE COMPLEMENT – 3RD SHOCK PLATOON
BOARDING: AUTHORIZED
Navarro exhaled.
“Well,” she said. “No backing out now.”
“You were planning to?” Song asked.
“No,” she said. “But it’s nice to know I missed the chance.”
They weren’t the only ones heading for the hatch. Other marines, some in brand-new uniforms like them, some in older kits with faded name tapes and extra campaign flashes, moved along the gangway with duffle bags slung, expressions ranging from grim to bored.
One woman with sergeant stripes and the kind of relaxed posture only people who’d been shot at a lot could pull off brushed past them, giving their fresh pins a once-over.
“Welcome to Valiant, kids,” she said. “Keep your heads down and your boots moving. She’s a good old bitch if you treat her right.”
Navarro opened her mouth, then shut it again.
Kaden stepped onto the gangway.
It vibrated faintly under his boots. Through the transparency to his right, Valiant’s hull filled his peripheral vision: the old paint, the new plates, the pod rings. The eagle’s torn wing.
His HUD chimed.
AURORA NODE TRANSFER: IN PROGRESS
SOURCE: FLEET MARINE ACADEMY NODE
DESTINATION: HIS VALIANT – SHIP NODE (VAL-329)
There was a strange second where nothing changed and everything did. A pressure behind his eyes, the sense of being weighed by something he couldn’t see.
Then:
NODE TRANSFER: COMPLETE
WELCOME, MERCER, KADEN – TIER 1 / LEVEL 2
HOST: HIS VALIANT (VAL-329)
His sheet flickered at the edge of his vision and then steadied.
Same stats. Same trait. Different quiet hum behind them.
The Academy had watched him through the last three years, safe in its corridors. Valiant watched him now. The node wasn’t a voice, but the feeling was new: older, heavier, full of a hundred thousand lines of logged fire and blood.
Behind him, Song let out a low whistle.
“Feel that?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Navarro said. “Ship’s got opinions.”
Kaden stepped off the gangway and through the hatch into Valiant’s interior.
The air smelled different. Drier. Ozone and machine oil and something that might have been scorched metal ground into the deck over decades.
Aurora’s status line sat steady in his vision. The node’s presence hummed along the back of his skull.
Somewhere inside this battered hull were people who had survived Erebus. Somewhere on one of these decks was Theta-3, rebuilt from what was left over.
Kaden adjusted the strap on his duffel, squared his shoulders, and followed the AR arrow deeper into the ship.
Behind him, visible through the hatch for one last moment, the eagle on Valiant’s flank looked ready to dive.